To manage the failures in an information system, a technique has been proposed in which failure instances each associating the symptom of an actual failure with the cause of the failure are stored in a database, and in accordance with the symptom of a failure, candidate causes are retrieved from the database and displayed. In this proposed technique, an index for determining the order in which the causes are to be investigated is also displayed by assigning a priority level to each of the candidate causes in accordance with descending order of the number of failure instances associated with the candidate cause.
However, investigating the causes in descending order of the number of instances of the failure is not necessarily the best way. Hence, an operation manager with insufficient skills to isolate the cause may investigate causes which an operation manager with high skills would skip investigating, resulting in a possible delay in recovery from the failure.